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Comment by officemonkey | Hacker News Reader

Now, ask 1000 Londoners to name a City in Illinois other than Chicago.

I'm British and I couldn't name any cities in Illinois other than Chicago and Springfield. (For some reason I know all the state capitals).

However, the UK is five times the size of Illinois.

~1.6x the size if you go by area rather than by population.

Lots of people in Chicago can't name a city in Illinois other than Chicago.

As a belgian european I often wonder if the United States seems as big to americans as Europe seems big to me.

I wonder if it feels different to be a citizen of a small country or a citizen of a continent-wide country such as the United States. Or maybe americans feel they are californians or new-yorkers before being american ?

I would say the culture here is fairly homogenous, so most people feel like Americans before they feel like a citizen of their home state.

Unless you're from Mississippi raises hand

Looking in from the outside, US culture is substantially less homogenous than Australian culture.

Cultural variety arises from isolation. The US was founded sufficiently long ago that there was time for each region to establish distinct cultural flavours, in no small part contributed by waves of immigration being unevenly spread throughout the country.

From my experience of meeting US citzens, even outside North America, it's fairly normal to get something like "Ohio", "Pensilvania" or "Wisconsin" when asking where they come from, as if I'd _of course_ know where those places are (I do).

We're definitely American first, but we do generally have a somewhat strong sense of state identity as well.

Citizen of small country adjoining a very large country here. People of small countries tend to understand that other cultures exist, because when they travel a couple of hundred miles (or less) in any direction they're in another country. I suppose for people living in the central regions of a very large country, it's your country and your people in every direction for as far as you can imagine. Then you tend not to be concerned too much about other cultures. But of course, I'm speculating here.

As an American in a relatively small Midwestern city, I think that's pretty much it.

I'm interested in what happens elsewhere in the world, but it feels impossibly far away, and ultimately it doesn't affect me here (at least not directly). Whenever I've checked, a roundtrip ticket anywhere out of the country has cost about $2000 and it takes a full day to get there. Then you're jet lagged. So, short vacations are out of the question. But it also takes me a full year of work to earn just 2 weeks vacation time, assuming I don't use any for special occasions. I didn't even bother getting a passport until two years ago, and I still haven't used it.

So yeah, even if an American desperately wants to travel somewhere out of the country, it's expensive and vacation time is scarce. So most never will. And at that point, knowing a list of English cities is purely trivia.

It's less by state and more by region. A rough "region guide" would include Northeast, Mid-west, South (geographic Southeast), Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, and the Great Plains. But this is a huge over-generalization and doesn't really include places like DC, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, or southern Florida, which have their own microcultures.

People from the Northeast definitely feel differently than people from California.

Having lived in both, the U.S. feels larger and also more homogeneous. When I lived in Belgium I was 90 minutes from Amsterdam, London, Paris and Cologne. In Chicago I'm 90 minutes from Milwaukee (if I speed.)

There is a lot of state pride in the U.S. but not many people put their love of their state before the love of their country (except for perhaps Texas.)

I also imagine it has something to do with how much American culture is exported in the world. As a Belgian, you probably won't be able to go your whole life just watching Belgian movies and TV and reading Belgian books. But it's quite possible and I'd imagine very common to do that as an American.

I don't know. A lifetime of Tintin comic books and "Septante et un" sounds pretty good.

To be fair, Canada and Mexico are also part of the continent :-) Although you did say continent-wide and the US does span the entire width...

Well more honestly you'd have to ask them to name another city in the states than NYC.

I'm not sure that many people outside the US would have even been able to cite Chicago when asked for a city in Illinois

and then ask 1000 Americans to name a city in Cambridgeshire other than Cambridge. what's your point?

Cambridgeshire? In that case, we're changing it from "Illinois" to "Cook County, IL"!

Evanston, Cicero, Blue Island, Park Ridge, Stone Park, River Forest, Harwood Heights, Steger, Worth, Palos Park.

I can go all week.

I'm British and could name many American cities (some I could even place on a map), but I have absolutely no idea which cities are inside which states -- I never seem to come into contact with state boundaries in every day life or in the media...

If memorising state capitals worries you, might I recommend Australia as a beginner's challenge? We only have six. Seven, if you count the Northern Territory.

Illinois is not a country. You should be glad people outside the US even know the name of the states at all. Do you know any county in Britain?

Yorkshire.

Illinois has more people in it than Belgium or Greece and is larger than Bulgaria. If you compare the U.S. to the E.U., you'll see that many of our states are bigger than your states.

13 U.S. states are bigger than Britain by size.

And 28 provinces in China have more people than Illinois. Can you name one?

Or a city in the District of Columbia other than Washington.

They have those?? goes to check Google Maps

They used to -- e.g., Georgetown -- but they long ago merged into Washington.

McHenry.

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